Germany's upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, voted overwhelmingly on Friday to support a ban against the neo-Nazi NPD, which the centre-Left government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder blames for stirring up racial hatred and violence. A day earlier, 200,000 people marched in Berlin protesting against neo-Nazi violence.

The lower house is expected to vote for a ban this week. It will then be up to the country's constitutional court to decide the matter in a process that could take up to two years. However, the initiative has come under fire from some politicians, legal experts and even liberal commentators.

Josef Joffe, of Germany's liberal Die Zeit newspaper said: "It is like declaring drugs, drunk-driving and Devil worship strictly illegal and hoping that these deviances will go away. Exorcism might work in the church. It does not work in politics." The government's decision to seek a ban has been prompted by a sharp increase in skinhead attacks on foreigners and growing anti-Semitism.

The Social Democrat-led coalition says that the problem has deterred foreign investment and disrupted plans to recruit thousands of non-EU workers. The NPD has only 7,000 members but it is regarded as an ideological seed bed for neo-Nazi violence. "The NPD clearly seeks through its slogans, banners and programmes to resemble the Nazi party," Otto Schily, the interior minister, said. "The Nazi party was also a small organisation in 1923. If I had been interior minister then I would have tried to ban it."

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If the constitutional court bans the NPD it will be the first extreme Right-wing party proscribed in Germany since 1952, when Konrad Adenauer's government received approval to outlaw the small Socialist Reich party because of its similarity to Hitler's Nazi party. Forty-eight years on, banning the far-Right is proving more difficult. The government's attempt has been denounced by commentators and many politicians as a knee-jerk response that will do little to combat racism.

Hartmut Jaeckel, the Social Democrat lawyer and political scientist, said: "After nearly half a century of political stability, Germany should be self-confident enough to dispense with the anti-democratic instrument of political party prohibition."

The proposed ban has also raised fears that instead of helping to crush neo-fascism, outlawing the NPD would actually strengthen the position of Germany's divided far-Right. The extreme Right is currently represented by the NPD and the equally racist Deutsche Volks Union and Republican parties. Bitter rivalry has so far prevented them joining forces.

Germany's liberal Free Democratic party is concerned that an NPD ban will bring unwelcome political change. "NPD members would then join the DVU and the Republicans," said Guido Westerwelle, the FDP general secretary. "It will be only a matter of time before these two parties carve up Germany for themselves with the DVU in the east and the Republicans in the west. The division of the far-Right will then be over."

The NPD, until recently regarded as politically irrelevant, is benefiting from the publicity that the proposed ban has given it. The party has set up an internet website and has attracted a wave of new members since the measures were discussed.

"We have got the legal arguments to win this battle," said Horst Mahler, the NPD's legal expert. "The Schroder government is going to regret embarking on this course."